We covered ResearchGate here on TechZulu sometime back. To give you a quick refresher ResearceGate is a professional network for scientists. And they have news that they are expanding.

According to the latest news from the company, ResearchGate has acquired Germany based Scholarz.net, an academic and reference management, knowledge management network founded in 2008 by economist and political scientist Dr. Daniel Koch and media technologist Marc Willwacher.

Scholarz.net now becomes part of ReseachGate.

According to co-founder and CEO Koch Scholarz.net has found the best possible new home for its users.

He says:

“With its two million users ResearchGate is a widely recognized among the global scientific community. This gives me the confidence that our users will continue to enjoy the best service possible.”

The idea Koch say began when he was working on his dissertation and needed a tool to organize his research to share with his colleagues has grown to be of help to thousands of researchers acrss the world.

Koch says it is used to increase the speed and quality of their work even though it was being outgrown by other networks like ResearchGate..

“The take-over by ResearchGate is fantastic new start, for us and for our users,” says Koch, and continues: “This ensures constant innovation and participation in the world’s most vibrant research community.”

Dr. Ijad Madisch, CEO and co-founder of ResearchGate is equally delighted about the acquisition:

“We’re happy to welcome scholarz.net users to ResearchGate. On our network they will find new opportunities for global scientific collaboration and new ways to build their reputation interactively and in real-time.” “Scholarz.net users,” says Madisch, “are a great addition to the ResearchGate community.”

ResearchGate will close down Scholarz.net come January 10, 2013 and at the moment is asking users to move with their files to ResearchGate.

Scholarz.net helps users accumulate and organise knowledge and use it more efficiently – on their own or with others. It also allows individual users or groups to gather ideas, to structure and organize knowledge and provides a convenient reference management and an efficient team work – locally and internationally which it says results into faster creation of theses, papers and research projects.

ResearchGate was founded in 2008 by the physicians Dr. Ijad Madisch and Dr. Sören Hofmayer along with computer specialist Horst Fickenscher and has more than two million researchers who can publish their findings, distribute them worldwide.

ResearchGate has completed two rounds of financing, led by Founders Fund partner Luke Nosek, co-founder of PayPal, and Matt Cohler of Benchmark Capital, co-founder of Linkedin and early employee of Facebook and is now embarking on expansion.